How To Not Die On Stage

This is not a text on how to become a great speaker.

For those who truly wish to become great, the main advice I can give is the same as that of the late, great New Yorker who, when asked by a young man how one gets to Carnegie Hall, answered “Practice, son, practice!” This, as there is no text, no book, no podcast, no webinar, nor any workshop that can truly teach you to become a great speaker. As in any other endeavor, greatness comes from practice, from having done something so often that it first becomes second nature, and later so ingrained that you become capable of continuously reflecting on this second nature.

That said, one can learn how to be better at speaking from a stage. Call it public speaking, call it professional speaking, or, as I do, call it keynoting, it is a skill and it can be improved. Now, why do I call it “keynoting” and not public speaking? Simple. Public speaking can be almost anything — presenting in front of a class, explaining a project to a team, addressing your local quilter’s association. Fine things, all of them. But the kind of speaking I do, and the kind I know best, is something else. It’s about something more than just standing up and addressing people, it’s about choosing to be on a stage, and from there address an audience. You might think the difference is small, even non-existant, but it is not.

Keynoting is the art of taking a stage and becoming the focal point of an audience, rather than just talking in general to a group of people.

Keynoting is about being alone on a stage, distanced from the audience, and loving it. Keynoting is about speaking not just with confidence (that you can do at a check-out counter), but speaking as if you belong on a stage, standing apart, for an extended period of time, and being comfortable in doing so. This isn’t an easy art. Some aren’t cut out for it, and others simply do not want to do it. That’s fine. Not everyone should. But for those who want to do this, a few words of advice. Not a complete course, but more a primer on the first, awkward steps.

Now, what’s the first step in keynoting? Simple.

It’s not dying on stage.

OK, I’m being a tad dramatic, but just a tad. I obviously don’t mean actually expiring on stage. If you do that, you really have nothing to worry about after that, at least in this life. Also, if there’s an afterlife, I really can’t help you with that. No, I’m talking about going on stage and totally failing. It’s known by many names. ‘Getting killed’, ‘bombing’, ‘choking’, and ‘failing to connect’. We’ve all done it, and it sucks. Dying on stage is when you try to open with a joke, and no-one laughs. Dying on stage is when you come to a point where you address the audience directly with a question or a prompt, and get icy silence as a reply. Dying on stage is when people start looking on their phones, or walking out, and everyone waits for you to just get off the dais. It’s horrible, the thing that every speaker dreads, and this text is about how to avoid this.

My reason for starting here is very simple: I see a lot of keynotes, and the thing that’s remarkable is how many of them bomb. This doesn’t mean that the keynote is interrupted or the speaker faints (although I’ve seen variations on both of these), but rather that the keynote that was supposed to be the grand finale becomes an embarrassing dud instead. What’s important to note about this is that this of course coincides perfectly with the central fear many have about public speaking, that one will fail on stage.

So, without further ado, some notes and observations on how to not die on stage, presented in the spirit that we’d have fewer failed keynotes, and more successful ones. Not so that failure would be impossible, or even rare, but so that more people dare to step up, prepared to, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Lead with your weakness

All speakers, from starting amateurs to seasoned professionals, have weaknesses. Some do not sparkle on stage, and thus need to depend more on the power of their material. Others may come with tidings less than welcome, or realize the moment they’re stepping on stage that their material may seem a tad dated to the audience. This might seem like the very recipe for dying on stage, but the truth is that it doesn’t have to be.

The first trick for not dying on stage is to acknowledge the weakness you might have on stage, and make the audience know that you know that they know.

This defuses the situation, and gets the audience invested in your struggle whilst making them interested in seeing how you’ll manage. For instance, if you suffer from acute stage fright, tell the audience this from the start. Saying it out loud might even free you from the fright, and it’s good for people to know that if you puke on stage, it’s nerves rather than a severe hangover. Also, much the same goes if you have a severe hangover.

For me, when I go in front of an audience, a core weakness is that I’m a professor, which most people takes to mean that I won’t only be irrelevant, I’ll be boring as well. Now, neither is true, but they don’t know that yet. So more often than not I start by making a few comments about professors, how they tend to come in with highfalutin’ words and abstract theories, and how I’m not interested in doing that. I also tend to quip something along the lines of “professor” being a Latin word for “arrogant bastard”. As silly as this might seem, it often relaxes audiences to no end.

So start by confessing your sins, owing up to your limitations, and flaunting your weaknesses. It might not save you, but it helps the audience help you.

If you need a moment, take a moment

The thing people rarely tell you about audiences is how innately nice they are. Now, I know that sounds surprising, because we’ve all seen hostile audiences. However, even a hostile audience can still show a modicum of care for you. What I mean by this is that audiences tend to give you a lot of leeway on stage, particularly if they see you’re struggling. As strange as it may seem, most members of an audience are very well aware how tricky it is to stand up there, and although they might have taken umbrage at your message or your delivery, that doesn’t mean they want you to fall flat on your face. That’s why I always recommend speakers to remember the possibility of simply taking a small break on stage.

Generally, audiences do not mind pauses.

When I started speaking I was still convinced that I had to fill all the time I’d been alotted, and on some unconscious level I assume I thought that the more words I spewed, the more value I created. Then I started learning the importance of pausing, allowing for the audience to reflect on a point you’ve made or react to the joke you sprang on them. Pauses are to speaking what white space is to design, in that the judicious use of both are critical so as not to cramp the presentation.

And this is good news for a person who is about to die on stage. Some try to power through, raising their voice, speeding up their delivery, going for more and more jokes as they one after another fall flat. A smarter speaker will realize that this is the time to regroup rather than launching another flailing attack, and simply be quite for a moment. You can announce to the audience: “I’m sorry, I just need to gather my thoughts.”, and then think of a good way to pick up. It signals to the audience that you’re taking them seriously, that you’re trying to do your best, and can even raise the interest in the room. What kind of come-back will you launch?

So don’t be afraid of the silence, neither their’s or your own. If you need to rethink your presentation while on stage, do so. Just don’t take more than a moment, and come back bigger and better.

Roll with the punches

Not everything is going to work. When designing a speech, one often luxuriates in the punchlines, the great reveals, the oh-so-clever transitions. The problem is that audiences don’t always react like you think they will. Not every joke gets a laugh, and sometimes your great reveal is met with silence (in some countries I could mention, this is the rule rather than the exception). This is where many speakers lose their composure, not to mention their plot.

Now, you can’t take a moment to regain your composure every time this happens. You can get away with that once, maybe twice, but to become competent at speaking, not to mention great at it, one needs to learn how to handle these moments, the ones that you’ve led up to with some fanfare, on an ongoing basis. Often these moments are characterized by one thing — a stony, cold silence, and it’s the most terrifying sound in the world. I’ve seen this sound paralyze speakers, or throw them off so much that they start stumbling through the rest of their material.

The trick is to adopt processes to deal with this, and since audiences are different, you cannot always trust the same approach. Personally, I like to go for one of two approaches, both of which have proven themselves in practice.

The first, one which I only go to in extreme circumstances, is to adopt an aloof, almost arrogant demeanor. If the audience isn’t reacting, it’s your job as a speaker to make it seem like they shouldn’t be reacting, and an efficient way to do this is to simply big yourself up on the stage. I do this by enunciating a little more clearly, slightly slow down my patter, and keep my face completely impassive, even when I deliver funny punchlines. It’s not a role I’m all too comfortable with, but it can work wonders. I’ve done this with a very hostile, even heckling audience (yes, there have been times), only to win them over by in a sense forcing them to engage. High aloofness is, however, easily read as high arrogance, and can backfire spectacularly. The benefit, however, is that you can quite easily keep the act up all the way through a keynote, and thus fulfill your main task (see the very last point).

The second, a little less arrogant but in its own way even sneakier, is what I’ve called “over-explaining”. Here, you start to pre-empt the lack of an audience response by simply telling the same audience how they should have reacted. As an example, if you do a joke about, let’s say, innovation, and you can feel it isn’t getting the laugh it deserves, immediately go into something along this: “Now, the reason that gets a laugh (even though it hadn’t), is because…” or “We find this funny, since…” This works by giving you back the control you may feel you’ve lost, and also by subconsciously making audiences feel they’ve missed something they really should have gotten.

What you need to do, then, is to be prepared to roll with the punches, and develop your own techniques to deal with the inevitable stumbles. Some do this by laughing at themselves, others by aloofness, but the art of not dying on stage always demands the capacity to adapt to the audience and it’s (non-)reactions. Which leads us to…

Have a plan B

Experienced speakers always have a story in their back pocket. Quite often, it’s a good story. It might even be their very best story, the kind of golden anecdote that you’d think they had as their killer closing bit, but which they instead keep for emergencies. I have a few, including one that I’m legally obliged never to tell, but that I keep with me just in case. We do this, because some time, when you’re facing an audience that just isn’t reacting to what you thought they’d react to, you need to change tacks. For an experienced speaker, that might involve going wholly off the reservation, breaking the plan of the keynote, and going to the well of time-tested classic materials.

In fact, the thing that separates an experienced speaker from an inexperienced one might be just this very fact, the capacity to be able to conjure up plan Bs unrehearsed, from memory.

For the less than experienced speaker, the one for whom such plan B, C and Ds aren’t second nature, a more systematic approach is needed. While rolling with the punches can save you from the occasional hiccup, there will be times where your approach just falls apart. It can be due to having completely misunderstood the tenor of the event, or because one has misunderstood the business those one is speaking to (I have myself been perilously close of messing up a keynote simply by not knowing the finer points of international B2B insurance). Regardless of the reason, you sometimes needs to dredge out a completely different kind of talk with very little warning or, in extreme cases, mid-presentation (Yes, I have seen this.).

The easiest way to do this is to plan for a far longer keynote than you’re asked to provide. Many of the greatest speakers have a master deck which is far too long to ever work in practice, simply so that they can adapt quickly.

Tom Peters, famously, has a master-deck called The Works (you can download it here), where chapter one alone has 129 slides! There are 14 chapters and an appendix.

For people who do not wish to compile a deck quite the size of Infinite Jest, a more practical approach is to construct your deck in parts, so that you have go-to material you can access if your presentation truly goes awry. Yes, this may require either a rather undignified clicking through of slides, at least unless you have your laptop on stage with you (which I always suggest and prefer), but it is a small price to pay for getting out of the sticks that is a presentation that isn’t working.

Your job is to end this

If you’re keynoting, your job is to get to the end of the keynote. Sure, motivation and the changing of lives might happen in the process, but your key task is to finish in style and on time. I do not say this to belittle the art of keynoting, but rather to de-mystify and de-romanticize it. You may come up against a hostile audience, or a mystified one, but that is just part of the job. Your job is not to get X number of laughs or applause, nor is it to get your ego massaged on stage. No, your job is to get to the end of the keynote with your head held high. I think of it much like I would of a marathon. Unless you’re a professional runner, the point with a marathon is not to do it in style, nor to manage some specific, pre-determined time, but simply to survive, which means running, in however shambolic a fashion, over the finish line.

The same goes for speaking. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to hang together (although it’d be nice if it is and does), your job is still to make damn sure that you fill your alloted time and get to that ending. Even if the audience might, at times, enjoy the surprising extra time awarded by you closing down mid-keynote, you’ve also let them down, not to mention event-organizers and the likes. You are there to give the keynote, so give the keynote. Stumbling might not be dignified, but it’s just stumbling. Being all over the map might not look cool, but it’s far better than giving up.

You do what runners do, put one foot/word in front of another. Don’t think about how far away the finish-line is, don’t look at your watch. Just continue. Don’t think about the audience being naked, think of them as not being there at all. It’s just you, and the road, I mean stage, and getting to that finish line. One slide and shuffle at a time.

So in the end there’s just one, critical advice I can give about not dying on stage: Just keep talking. However you can, whatever it takes.

You’ll survive, trust me. Your next speech will be better, and the one after that will be greater still. Always remember, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.